Joseph CSAKY

About his Art Sculptor József Csáky (Szeged, 1888 – Paris, 1971) studied briefly in Budapest before settling in Paris in 1908 and taking a studio at La Ruche where his neighbors included Alexander Archipenko, Marc Chagall, Henri Laurens, Fernand Léger, and Chaim Soutine. Picasso and Braque had just begun experimenting with Cubism, and Csáky and Archipenko were among the first to create Cubist sculptures. Marcel Duchamp included his sculptures in the Salon de la Section d’Or of 1912. Unfortunately, Csáky’s enthusiastic and significant participation in the Parisian avant-garde was curtailed by World War I. He volunteered for the French army and became a French citizen in 1919. After the war, he incorporated smooth geometric shapes, cones, and discs into his sculptures and paintings. Late in the decade, his stylistic development led away from avant-garde practices towards figurative art, and his name virtually disappeared from art history. A recent resurgence of interest in his work resulted in several monographs. Csáky first studied at the Mintarajziskola, Budapest, in 1905–06. Finding the teaching too conservative, however, he left art school and worked in the studio of painter and designer László Kimnach before finding employment at the Zsolnay ceramics factory and a lead foundry in Budapest. While Csáky’s own work in stone carving would evolve with his discovery of the work of Auguste Rodin, these early experiences laid the groundwork for an oeuvre characterized by a mastery of sculptural techniques. In 1908 Csáky traveled to Paris and attended the Académie de la Palette. He worked in Montparnasse, in a complex of artists’ studios known as La Ruche (the beehive). Of the many works Csáky produced during this seminal period, most were in plaster, and only two survive: Standing Woman (1913), an abstract and austere statue composed of fragmented oscillating planes, and Head (1914), which is characterized by stylized lines and echoes of African sculpture. After volunte Show more